From Me to We: Shared Multi-User Personalized Experiences in Smart Environments

Personalized experiences within single-user applications have become ubiquitous, yet when multiple people share a physical space, smart environments are either made to adapt to individual user preferences or to stereotypical predefined groups. Hence, mechanisms and design principles are needed to blend and share individual preferences. In this paper, we propose a multi-user music playback scenario and prototype a decentralized application that combines Solid Pods to store users’ music and sharing preferences, and a Mixed Reality application that enables users to blend individual preferences into a collective music experience using smart speakers. We take this exploratory scenario to suggest relevant design dimensions to consider when creating solutions for shared multi-user personalized experiences in smart environments.

Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Kimberly Garcia, Sven Durrer, and Simon Mayer. 2026. From Me to We: Shared Multi-User Personalized Experiences in Smart Environments. In Companion of the 2026 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion ’26), October 11–15, 2026, Shanghai, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3798063.3837234